Written by former Senate education staffer and journalist Alexander Russo, This Week in Education covers education news, policymakers, and trends with a distinctly political edge. (For archives prior to January 2007, please click here. For posts after November 2007, please click here.) Comments on this blog are now closed.

This Week's Business News

Longtime readers of this site know that education is a business, with billions in transactions that involve vendors, management companies, consultants, and universities. Pretending that it's not -- that "public education" is entirely public and that there's a bright line between it and the private sector except for vouchers or charters -- doesn't do anyone any good in the long run. It just means you don't know what's really going on, for better or worse.

This concludes the sermon. Click below if you want to read about a tiny online publisher buying a giant old-school publisher, about tech deals gone sour in Detroit, and about how they got 50 percent of the parents participating in SES in Indianapolis.

Houghton Mifflinâs Sale to Software Maker Reflects Trend EdWeekThe takeover of the venerable American firm, which has published such great American writers as Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau, by a young, foreign, and smaller technology concern is a bold move, said industry analyst Trace Urdan, a managing director with Signal Hill, a San Francisco investment bank. “This is like the minnow swallowing the whale,” he said.

Detroit schools dump 3 tech deals Detroit Free Press
In a political flip-flop that stirred emotions Thursday night, the Detroit school board voted to rescind three of four controversial technology contracts and agreed to give Superintendent William F. Coleman III -- who was at the center of the storm over the $58-million deal -- an interview for his own position.

School board weighs ties to vendor Houston Chronicle
The Houston school board could decide this week whether to keep doing business with a local technology company that has lost the confidence of a major computer supplier amid an ongoing ethics probe in Dallas.

Tutoring In Indy Scholastic Administrator
More than 50 percent of the eligible kids in Indianapolis public schools signed up for NCLB-required tutoring last year, a whopping number achieved through extensive outreach to parents and tutoring providers, as well as an open enrollment process.Unfortunately, the success in Indianapolis is probably more the exception than the rule.